You, Molaro, Burke and $3 million

The pols count on you to get mad and then … forget.

December 19, 2011

Which gouge most enrages you? Is it the injury Bob Molaro inflicts on you and every Illinois taxpayer? Or is it the spiteful insult from his enabler Ed Burke?

The injury: As the Tribune and WGN-TV reported Friday, all it took for former state Rep. Molaro to nearly double his public pension was spending one month as an aide to Ald. Ed Burke, chairman of the Chicago City Council's Finance Committee. Under Illinois' diabolical pension math, Molaro's $12,000 pay for that month pushed his pension from about $64,000 a year to more than $120,000. Over his expected life span, he'll collect some $3 million.

The insult: During this monthlong scam which begat lifelong dividends, little taxpayer, Burke and Molaro were sneering at you. Burke had Molaro, his fellow Democrat, write a 19-page white paper about Chicago's ailing pension funds. Can't you see the two of them delighting in Molaro's term paper — his work product consists mainly of public information readily available from pension funds — while they're … grabbing pension funds! Is that delicious or what?

This being Illinois, you can trust that the city and state pension funds jointly shunting taxpayer money to Molaro are severely underfunded. Which means that, like all the pension grabs that the Tribune and WGN-TV are detailing, this puts rank-and-file public workers at personal financial risk: If and when Illinois governments cannot sustain their eventually unsustainable pension promises, taxpayers' attention will turn with a vengeance toward all these insiders who today are draining so many of your dollars from those funds.

What the insiders are doing may well be legal, because our public officials have crafted Illinois' more-than-1,000-page pension code to legalize their graft.

What they're doing unarguably is, though, corrupt — that is, immoral, debased and venal. They are gaming public pension systems. And you, taxpayer, are the real mark.

We aren't sure how to calibrate these arrogancies: Is Burke's gift of your money to Molaro worse than state legislators making union lobbyists eligible for lifetime teachers' pensions because they spent one day subbing in a classroom? Is it worse than Chicago's City Hall rehiring a prominent labor leader for a day so he could collect a $158,000 public pension?

These cases only hint at the whole, lethal iceberg that is Illinois' public pension debacle. But they keenly illustrate how this state's political class exploits the billions of dollars flowing through these funds. The pols use this money to buy friendship and favors, loyalty and legwork. State lawmakers' crafty pension plan revisions — more than 700 in less than a decade — that camouflage many of these sly pension code abuses from taxpayer scrutiny.

The most telling sentence from the expose in Friday's Tribune: "House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton declined to comment for this story."

Of course they declined to comment. Together, Madigan and Cullerton have spent nearly eight decades in Springfield. They helped knit many of the loopholes through which self-serving pols such as Molaro sneak millions. As proof that they have no defense, the legislative leaders are forever citing an inadequate bill they passed last year as proof of their commitment to reform; the bill reduces future pension earnings only for employees hired after Jan. 1, 2011, so in the next decades it won't reduce actual pension payouts by one dime.

Another of Friday's disclosures: Since enactment in the mid-1990s of a 50-year plan to salvage the state's pension system, the Legislature provided more than $5.8 billion in benefit increases and giveaways that weren't paid for. That alone accounts for about 10 percent of the total increase in the state's pension debt during that time — a debt officially pegged at $85 billion in mid-2010 but in reality much higher today.

The pols would rather you didn't see how they use these pension funds for their political ends. But they're never too alarmed when you do. They count on you to get mad and then … forget.

Just as Bob Molaro counted on you to forget when his wife Barbara pleaded guilty in 1997 to ghost-payrolling, admitting she took $39,300 but did no work as a contract employee for the state Senate. No, she didn't even have to write a phony paper about state pensions.

As for Bob Molaro, don't worry, you'll keep sending him your tax dollars. As for the half of those dollars traceable to Molaro's month pondering the public pension implosion of which he's a part, well, his spokesman assured our reporters that, "There was nothing unusual about what he was paid."